DCO Highlights

Program highlights, project updates, and announcements

24 July, 2014

At the first DCO Early Career Scientist Workshop in Costa Rica, February 2014, the attendees set a goal to continue building and shaping a network of early career deep carbon scientists, and to strive to meet the needs of this network within the broader DCO community. As part of meeting this goal, several workshop participants crafted session proposals for the 2014 AGU Fall Meeting to cover myriad aspects of the DCO program. All three proposals were accepted. We encourage all DCO scientists to...

21 July, 2014

Several DCO researchers have received renewed funding from the US Department of Energy for Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs). This program is intended to accelerate transformative discovery in basic scientific disciplines that can ultimately be applied to increasing global energy needs. These topics include energy generation, supply, transmission, and storage.
Russell Hemley (Carnegie Institution of Washington, USA; DCO Co-Executive Director) will lead Energy Frontier Research in Extreme...

21 July, 2014

By Florian M. Schwandner, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA, USA
NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) was finally successfully launched on 2 July 2014 from Vandenberg Air Force base in California. This event marks not only the successful completion of unfinished business after the tragic January 2009 loss of the first OCO (the fairing protecting the observatory atop the launch vehicle didn’t separate). It also marks the culmination of a...

23 June, 2014

In Spring 2014 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation approved three new DCO proposals to support DCO’s Secretariat, Engagement Team, and Data Science Team for the next two years. These three groups will continue to work in a coordinated manner to advance DCO’s decadal goals.
The proposals reflect the distinct but complementary roles of each group. The Secretariat, based at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, will continue to provide scientific leadership through communication,...

18 June, 2014

On 5 June 2014, 40 DCO scientists met at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA, to discuss the role of Data Science in the DCO community. The primary goal of Data Science Day was to provide an opportunity for in depth discussions of data management and data science activities across a broad range of scientific disciplines. All four DCO Science Communities were represented, allowing for the technical challenges and specific big data needs of each to be thoroughly explored.
The day...

30 May, 2014

THE DEADLINE FOR THIS FUNDING OPPORTUNITY HAS PASSED. FOR CURRENT CoDL FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES PLEASE GO HERE.
Proposal submission deadline, 27 June, 2014.
Since 2011, the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Deep Life Community has sponsored the Census of Deep Life (CoDL), which in turn has supported surveys of the diversity of microbes present in several deep continental and subseafloor environments. The first surveys (2011-2012) were conducted using 454 pyrosequencing and subsequently (...

27 May, 2014

by John M. Saul
During a varied career in geology, I have observed two matters that seem to stand out as fundamental truths. First of all, there is a great deal that we do not understand about the workings of Earth. And secondly, it is clear that everything is connected. Not just the many aspects of geology — mineralogy, earthquake studies, water supplies, oil and gas exploration, and much else — but also planetary astronomy, biology, and even cancer studies. The connections are not...

22 May, 2014

“Biosignatures Across Space and Time,” a joint conference of the Nordic Astrobiology Network and the University of Bergen’s Centre for Geobiology, was held in Bergen, Norway, 20 to 22 May 2014. More than 100 scientists from 19 countries gathered to discuss aspects of the origins, evolution, and potentially observable biomarkers of life on Earth and other worlds. Dozens of the more than 85 lecture and poster presentations focused on aspects of the detection, distribution, and characterization of...

5 May, 2014

Recent Field Work Investigates a Modern Analog to Explore Volcanic Carbon’s Role in Ancient Environments
A French research team is investigating volcanic carbon’s role in fueling biomass in the Dziani Dzaha crater lake located in the Comoros Archipelago, a small volcanic hotspot chain in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Mozambique. The alluring emerald Dziani Dzaha on Petite Terre, one of France’s Mayotte islands, may prove to be a gem to Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) scientists...

24 April, 2014

In March of 2014, the eagerly anticipated revival of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos starring Neil DeGrasse Tyson aired on American television. The series reunited the original writing team of Steven Soter and Ann Druyan, and has been met with widespread critical praise and impressive viewership figures (8.5 million people tuned in to the first episode, which launched on 10 networks). President Barack Obama introduced the first episode, and highlighted the spirit of exploration and discovery that embodies...

23 April, 2014

DCO’s Executive Committee met in Washington, DC, USA, 13-14 March 2014. Taking place close to the midpoint of the program’s 10-year remit, the meeting focused on DCO’s future scientific endeavors—including the steps needed to ensure reaching DCO’s decadal goals by 2019. The DCO’s four scientific communities evolved and matured during the DCO’s first five years, with each community making great scientific strides and sending scientists in new directions, many unanticipated at the outset of the...

22 April, 2014

A new short film investigates the challenges of sending human missions to Mars, a goal that many believe will facilitate the search for life on the Red Planet. DCO’s Claire Cousins, an astrobiologist and Royal Society of Edinburgh research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK, was interviewed in the film, which also uses video footage Cousins collected during her DCO-funded exploratory expedition to Disko Island, Greenland, in August 2013. The goal of the expedition was to...

24 March, 2014

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has approved funding for a suite of international DCO field expeditions that will benefit all four DCO Communities. These activities, led by an international team of researchers, are scheduled to run for three years, starting in April 2014. Such a focused yet strongly cross-disciplinary effort exemplifies DCO’s vision, and will advance many of DCO’s guiding decadal goals.
In a project led by proposal PI Peter Kelemen (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia...

26 February, 2014

The Deep Carbon Observatory’s “New Generation Technology in Deep Carbon Science” symposium was held at the James A. Baker III Hall of Rice University, Houston, Texas on January 15-16, 2014. The meeting was made possible through generous funding from the Sloan Foundation, Shell Exploration and Production Company, and Rice University. The goal of the one-and-a-half daylong symposium was to engage the energy industry in a conversation about recent developments and synergies related to global...

26 February, 2014

The University of Costa Rica in San José played host to the 1st Deep Carbon Observatory Early Career Scientist Workshop 18-21 February 2014. This week-long workshop, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Elementa, Technodiamant, Almax easyLab, and PLOS ONE, brought together more than forty early career deep carbon scientists from around the world. Equal parts scientific talks and fieldwork, the workshop was designed to cultivate new collaborations and initiate a network of early career...

26 February, 2014

THE DEADLINE FOR THIS FUNDING OPPORTUNITY HAS PASSED. FOR CURRENT CoDL FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES PLEASE GO HERE.
Proposal submission deadline, 31 March, 2014.
Since 2011, the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Deep Life Community has sponsored the Census of Deep Life (CoDL), which in turn has supported surveys of the diversity of microbes present in several deep continental and subseafloor environments. The first surveys (2011-2012) were conducted using 454 pyrosequencing and subsequently (2013)...

29 January, 2014

January 10, 2014
Dear DCO Colleagues,
Happy New Year from the Deep Carbon Observatory! It’s a good time to think back on where we’ve come from and to look forward to an exciting year ahead.
It’s hard to believe that DCO is rapidly approaching the halfway mark in its 10-year adventure. Yes, it’s true, we’ve reached our robust “middle age” and are enjoying remarkable discoveries on a weekly basis. Together we’ve created a research community of nearly 1000 scientists in 40 countries. Last year we...

28 January, 2014

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting took place 9-13 December 2013 at the vast Moscone Conference Center in San Francisco, CA, USA. Many of the more than 22,000 Earth and planetary scientists who were present share the Deep Carbon Observatory’s goals.
Deep Energy, Deep Life, and a Host of Press for DCO
Isabelle Daniel
The October issue of American Mineralogist featured a paper by Muriel Andreani, Isabelle Daniel, and Marion Pollet-Villard of University Claude Bernard Lyon 1,...

17 December, 2013

As part of the Third International Conference on Crystallogenesis and Mineralogy in Novosibirsk, Russia, from 27 September to 1 October 2013, The Deep Carbon Observatory co-sponsored a symposium, "Deep Carbon Cycle: Mineralogy and Crystal Chemistry of Carbon-bearing Compounds". The conference had over a dozen co-sponsors and was hosted by the V.S. Sobolev Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB-RAS). Located near the famed Siberian kimberlites...

6 December, 2013

The first Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) Summer School will be held 13-18 July 2014 at Big Sky Resort in Montana with fieldwork in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The purpose of the Summer School is to introduce 30 students, postdocs, and/or early-career researchers interested in deep carbon science to the interdisciplinary concepts which are the cornerstone of DCO’s approach to understanding Earth. Lodging and meals will be provided at no cost to summer school students, and...

The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is a global community of multi-disciplinary scientists unlocking the inner secrets of Earth through investigations into life, energy, and the fundamentally unique chemistry of carbon.